Click

Amazon has a new program called Vine where you can obtain advance copies of things to review. The first one I received is a book by a San Francisco Internet executive in a company called Hitwise called Click.

If you have any interest in how the internet is changing the way we look at the world, you should read this book. It is funny and informative. It offers a lot of interesting facts - for example -
* Porn sites on the web are a declining part of the total volume and Sunday is the weakest day for porn searches.
* The average teen couple spends $1200 on the Senior Prom and the search phase for prom dresses goes in two phases.
* Liberal blog spots like the Daily Kos, tend to cluster (move people to similar sites) more than conservative ones like Townhall.

All that would be interesting in itself but Tancer then goes on to think about some of the implications of all the data that is available from the net. What he seems to suggest is something that I first read in a book that Michael Lewis wrote several years ago called Next: the Future Just Happened Nancer has the same ability that Lewis does in weaving thoughts together in an entertaining way. But why I think Tancer's book is more useful is that he is able to link speculation about changes with data. While Lewis went from investment banks to baseball to technology future - Nancer seems to be imbedded in thinking about how the internet will change us by being able to link us in all sorts of new ways.

Tancer maintains a blog and a couple of other sites where he puts his current meanderings through data up. Some of his recent posts include the differences in olympics viewing and the market segmentation on how searches are conducted about McCain and Obama, which seems to show that blues and reds receive their news from different sources. So in one sense he is updating the initial premises in the book in realtime. But don't just go to the blog, read the book!